Factory Farming Needs to End

I worked for years in the poultry industry, mostly for Tyson, doing anything from catching the chickens from the houses to slitting their throats in the killing room of the slaughter houses. I was so disgusted and enraged by my experiences at their slaughter plant in Grannis, Arkansas that I came forward with a sworn complaint against the company, the plant manager, and several workers, and have now set up a website to further spread the word of how the greed of this corporate giant is victimizing society and animals alike.

Almost any animal rights website you go to will tell of the horrific conditions these animals live and die under. The fact is that what they say doesn't even come close to the horrors I have seen. I have seen the chickens pulled apart, stomped on, scalded alive, beaten by workers (sometimes to death by order of supervisors), even blown up with dry ice bombs, and more...

The plant manager turned down the stunner, thus not properly stunning the birds, just to save money and get a bonus for efficiency. He also turns up the line speed to an impossible rate for the same reason. We were not evacuated for a bomb threat until a bomb was found and the sheriff ordered Tyson to do so. These incidents are just a small example of the attitude that creates many of the problems there.

Tyson smuggles in illegals and forces them to work in unsafe working conditions for low pay. Any strike by the workers for better conditions have been broken by the company by bringing in workers and firing all strikers. Any complaint by someone like myself would result in being fired and replaced by such individuals.

There is a cesspool they use to treat the waste that has overflowed into a creek, resulting in a citation from the EPA on one occasion. Of course ,they got away with many more such occasions. This creek just so happens to feed into a lake that is the water source for a whole town in neighboring Oklahoma. In fact, Oklahoma is trying to keep Arkansas from being allowed to continue to pollute the rivers flowing into that state, but the governor said that the pollution couldn't be helped when there were storms. He told them that runoff was inevitable and it would be too damaging economically to Arkansas to do anything about it.

Now we hear that the administration is going to let them be released from regulation under the Clean Air Act, and the EPA won't regulate the sludge disposal because these threats just aren't serious enough. The industry can create all the nasty stuff it wants as long as it continues to bring in the money. The government will even subsidize it to make sure it continues to do so.

This corporate control over our land, water, and air as well as the food many of us eat has got to stop. People in the world are starving because more and more feed is going to feed livestock instead of people, so that the rich can enjoy meat, while the poor starve or subsist on whatever they can scrounge. Entire ecosystems are being ruined to clear the way for more factory farming around the world, introducing the concept and demand for meat in countries where it did not previously exist. Meanwhile the rich fat cats get fatter and control more of the politicians and leaders of the world.

If anyone is interested in more of what I have to tell of how Tyson operates and the dirty little secrets that the industry doesn't want you to know, my website is at http://cyberactivist.blogspot.com